New Report about Open Data for an Open Society

Open Data, Open Society is a report written by Marco Fioretti for the
Institute of Economics of Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna. The report
represents the first part of a research project (1) financed through
the DIME network (Dynamics of Institutions and Markets in Europe), as
part of DIME Work Package 6.8, coordinated by Professor Giulio
Bottazzi.

The report discusses the current and potential role, in a truly open
society, of raw Public Sector Information (PSI) that is really open,
that is fully accessible and reusable by everybody. The general
characteristics of PSI and the conclusions are based on previous
studies and on the analysis of current examples both from the European
Union and the rest of the world.

The full report is released under a Creative Commons cc-by license (2)
and can be freely downloaded as a single file in HTML or PDF format
from the websites of DIME (3) and of the Sant’Anna school (4). In
order to facilitate as much as possible feedback and discussion on
each single part, the whole report, split in separate pages with
comments open to anonymous readers, is also available online at

The “Open Data, Open Society” project will continue with an online
survey that will attempt to assess how many types of raw PSI are
already released, in which formats and under which licenses, by the
city and regional administration of the EU-15 countries. A final
report will summarize and comment the results of the survey. For more
information please contact: